Listening to Thelonious Monk play I Surrender, Dear, or listening to Cecil Taylor play one of his own compositions, we are concern...ed with the struggle of the performer against the predetermined nature of his medium (the theme, the chord structure, etc.). Like jazz performance, film acting is improvisatory, on an almost metaphysical level. In the drama, the aim of performance is to achieve a kind of psychophysical translucence, whereby the potencies imagined by the author of the drama "shine through" the immitigable fasciculate of presence-on-the-stage. In film, however, the dramatic text is--rightly--only a pre-text for its eruption into the moving figures, the absurd images, who are not really there but whom the film, at the height of its artifice, can convince us do exist in their own lucid fasciculate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Who could not be moved by the sight of that poor, demoralized rabble, outwitted, outflanked, outmaneuvered by the U.S. military? Y...et, given time, I think the press will bounce back.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The U.S. is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up wi...th his or her father. Today an American child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is now approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The most important domestic challenge facing the U.S. at the close of the twentieth century is the re-creation of fatherhood as a ...vital social role for men. At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment. For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments--not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools--will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence. To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued social recession.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S.... to the Soviet Union.... I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

U.S. international and security policy ... has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call "the Fifth Freedom," und...erstood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

If we eliminated the dog from our lives, nothing much would happen to our ecology. Independent of man, the dog is a vandal. With m...an, he does a little sheep-herding, a little watch-dogging. He helps law enforcement officers control the troublesome ghetto-dwellers and protest marchers. He sniffs out "hash" and "grass." He goes out on weekends and helps man murder other forms of life for pleasure. But mostly he is just an adjunct to man's ego.... The cat owes man nothing. Some experts estimate that there is one homeless cat managing on its own for every one with a home, which makes a total cat population in the U.S. of more than fifty million. That means the largest nonhuman animal population in the nation, short of rodents, whose number is beyond estimate. Eliminate cats from our ecology and, in a matter of weeks, we would be overrun by rodents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It's not the possibility of Stalinism in the U.S. that's worrying me, it's the fact that the Stalinist C.P. seems doomed to fail a...nd to bring down with it all the humanitarian tendencies I personally believe in--all the while acting as a mould on which its obverse the fascist mentality is made--and this recent massacre is certainly a sign of Stalinism's weakness not of its strength. None of that has anything to do with Marx's work--but it certainly does influence one's attitude towards a given political party.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »